US State Department Suffers Worldwide Email Outage (usatoday.com)

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: The U.S. State Department's email system underwent a worldwide outage Friday, affecting all its unclassified communications within and outside of the department. The system was fully restored by Friday afternoon [after 12 hours], said a State Department official briefed on the incident who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.

It was not clear what caused the early morning outage, but spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters it was not "any external action or interference."

Comments

Logical conclusion:

[Archtech]

'... spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters it was not "any external action or interference."'

So just incompetence, then.

Re:Logical conclusion:

[omnichad]

If they don't know what caused it, I don't really know how they can fully rule out external actors being involved.

Re:Logical conclusion:

[El Cubano]

So just incompetence, then.

I came here to say just that. You might be surprised at just how bad it is.

In most cases, government IT is a dumpster fire. I could go on at length, but the absolute best example of it is the failed FBI Virtual Case File project. IEEE did a very in depth write up of it several years ago.

If I recall correctly, the objective was that the FBI tried implement a system after 9/11 that would allow its field agents to collaborate more effectively than phone calls and non-government email (apparently most field agents used things like Yahoo! and HotMail because they either couldn't get government email accounts or they sucked so badly). After years of ill-defined and constantly changing requirements and $300+ million spent, the project was terminated as a failure and the government actually got nothing out of it. Go read the IEEE story on it for more details.

The problem is that this sort of thing happens constantly with projects of all sizes and scopes. Of course, if you've worked in corporate IT, you will recognize that similar things happen there as well.

Re:Logical conclusion:

[MoarSauce123]

I bet on Windows updates going haywire.

Re:Logical conclusion:

[Anonymous Coward]

If they don't know what caused it, I don't really know how they can fully rule out external actors being involved.

It's actually exceptionally simple, but I'll explain it in detail for you.

Say you are the sysadmin in charge of a server, which goes down one day and so far all you have discovered is that pressing the power button appears to do nothing at all.

Within a minute or two of you discovering this, your boss is asking for a comprehensive detailed report on what is wrong.
You tell him the server won't power up, but you aren't sure why.
Boss asks if it was Russian hackers, to which you look at him like he's a moron for even asking and you say "No, I just said the server isn't powering on"

A moment later your boss sends out a company wide email stating that the server administrators do not know what caused the outage, but have ruled out external actors being involved.

Reporters are similar to your boss in the above made-up situation. They don't care about details and tech stuff and how things work. Their eyes totally glaze over.
The "report" also has the primary goal of being short and concise, without a lot of qualifiers and details, just simple and to the point at the cost of being accurate in ways most reading the report won't care about.
They also likely don't care about attributing words to you that you did or did not say.

This all combines to get the result you see and are confused by, and is almost always what happens when your words get filtered through other people like this.

Uh, so....

[sconeu]

Hilary's server is still up, right?

[DISCLAIMER: I dislike both parties]

Re:Uh, so....

[jruschme5184]

I was thinking the opposite... someone shut down a Clinton server, not realizing it was the backbone for the entire State Department.

And no one noticed.

[biggaijin]

However, the global temperature dropped 0.3 degrees Celsius because of reduced hot air emissions.

But no big loss.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The Secretary of State remained in complete and continuous contact with all people using a server in the basement of the Secretary's residence. The value of precedent set by a previous secretary of state was greatly appreciated by the Administration.